The charm of The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City is immediate before you even open the box. It’s a chunky, fairly weighty thing, the equivalent of four regular board games stacked on top of one another, or less whimsically, like a box of crockery you might pack when moving house. On sight alone, Panic in Gotham City tells you that despite being an augmented reality game, there are still a lot of physical pieces - which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm only one episode in (21 percent, according to the accompanying app), but my resounding takeaway is that Panic in Gotham City is a fantastic tabletop game that does everything in its power to stop you from playing it.
The box informs us the entire game, made up of seven episodes, takes between four to six hours, but it took us more than two to get past the first part. This did include a change from kitchen table to living room coffee table in order to project to the television, but that still puts us at almost ten hours at our current rate. This was a team of seven people, enthusiastic and experienced with escape rooms, logic puzzles, and the Batman IP, and still we were slow.
We plan to revisit the game in the coming weeks - and with it, I will return with a full review - and I am hopeful we can shave some hours off our current projected completion time. The first episode is needlessly slow with its pacing. While that might work if you have a group of people prepared to dedicate a whole Saturday to playing it from start to finish, it did not work forꦐ the episodic way most will play - especially strange when the game itself is cleanly divided into episodes.
Looking back on what we have accomplished so far, it seems odd to think it took us two hours. First we had to find a message with a blacklight, then use the phone to find a secret message by spotting letters circled in a newspaper, then find some animals on an AR map, then find some graffitied signs in an AR city. That was it. I might be making it sound dull by listing all this finding so plainly - figuring out the newspaper message was satisfying and discovering the animals charming - but the fact is we didn't do all that much. Harley Quinn, the star on the box art and ostensibly the game's protagonist, doesn't even show up until the cutscene that ends the first episode.
None of this is putting me off playing again. I can't wait to revisit it when we have free time soon. But the opening definitely damages the pacing, and if you're in a group where some are more interested than others, that's going to really hurt your ability to sell them on the game - which let's be honest, is often as important a part of a game night than anything else.
The problem is the game comes with a map of Gotham City that you must build throughout, three quarters of which is done during the first episode. The first building is easy - it's four tall walls and a roof. The sturdy cardboard snaps together, and away you go. The next one is a little trickier - it's three sets of four tall walls and a roof stacked on top of each other. All three parts are easy enough in practice, but the fact they need to be stabilised with an extra sheet of card in the middle of each tower, and the difficulty in slotting these together without breaking the pieces, make them trickier. However, by far the most baffling is the third building, which aside from having two layers and a radio tower on top, is for some reason not boxed shape but has the door set back from the wall, meaning the front piece is not a single piece at all, but five fiddly interlocking pieces that fall apart when placed under any duress whatsoever.
It’s the construction of these buildings - particularly because they are needlessly fragile, are built so frequently in the early stages, and offer limited gameplay rewards - that derails the experience. The mixture between AR projection and physical pieces is fantastic, although a television is essential compared to using your phone, but you're constantly having to stop playing the game to build the game, and I can't imagine that was the intention.
A few in my group also suggested there were too many animals to find, with 12 in total, but I don't think that would be an issue if the buildings weren't so tricky. The animals were the most engaging part of the game, finding each one only took a few seconds, and even those less interested in the puzzles or Batman lore could crack a smile at the pandas rolling down a slide at a children's park. It was universally the most popular part of the first episode, and when you have a thing like that, the solution is not to shorten it.
The animal game was memory, where there were 12 possible options and each one held a distinct animal, so when looking for say, the rhino, one had only to remember where you last saw a rhino if you guessed incorrectly while looking for an elephant. Cutting the animals down to six wouldn't just cut playtime in half, it would be closer to a quarter because you'd also be eliminating wrong answers. I don't think the solution would come in tweaking the gameplay itself, but in having less ambitious buildings that add very little to the experience aside from minutes on the clock and frustration on the brain.
We played The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City for over two hours, became very frustrated with it, and still can't wait to play again - an obvious hallmark of success. I'll have more to say in a full review, but for now, all I can offer is a word of warning - it takes a long time to actually begin playing this game, so you should brace yourself and any reluctant players amongst you for that reality.